"I think I'm fucking melting:" Reclaiming Eminem's Relapse (2009)

“Those last two albums don’t count, Encore I was on drugs, Relapse I was flushing ‘em out!”-Eminem, “Not Afraid”

EMINEM’S TRIUMPHANT COMEBACK

Eminem’s triumphant comeback was bound to produce creative fatalities. Marshall Mathers III faced a critical and personal (though not commercial) downturn following the release of his 2004 album Encore. His best friend, fellow rapper Proof, was shot and killed outside of a nightclub two years later. He gained a tremendous amount of weight, became addicted to painkillers and prescription drugs, and didn’t release a new record four years in a row. Em teased retirement. He became remarried to Kim, his ex-wife, baby momma, and malignant muse, only to seemingly come to his senses and annul. “I went into such a dark place,” he told XXL magazine. “And the more drugs I consumed…the more depressed I became, the more self-loathing I became...”

His career didn’t reclaim its tremendous early traction until the 2010 release of Recovery. Em was back, he said, “No more fuckin’ around.” He was, fittingly, slim again, fit, confident, wielding a steroid Bone Thugs flow and a massive crossover hit with “Love The Way You Lie,” a pop lament for domestic violence boasting a gorgeous Rhianna hook-as evidenced by Love and her work on Drake’s “Take Care,” Rhianna is only as good as the producers and artists she’s temporarily stitched to-and an excellent Joseph Kahn music video starring Megan Fox. Eminem’s personal nightmare was over.

THE RESULT

The result was Eminem’s readily enthusiastic dismissal of his previous two albums, Encore and 2009’s Relapse. He was eager to tell Rolling Stone that a different person made those records, starting with Encore, which, in his current frame of mind, was nothing more than a sustained single fart running 60 minutes of CD time.

Encore is a difficult, divisive album, but Eminem is lying to himself by downplaying the content of the work. For one thing, it shouldn’t even be pigeonholed as “hip-hop,” because it isn’t. Encore is an Avant-Garde gauntlet of bacchanalian expression, where Em bops like a pinball against dada (in the songs “My First Single,” “Ass Like That”), sincere emotional pleading (“Like Toy Soldiers”), hater-bating nonsense (the indescribable “Rain Man”), relationship confessionals that grimly plumb the eternal gulf between women and a certain breed of successful rappers (“Spend Some Time,” featuring 50 Cent, Obie Trice, etc) and further love to a daughter he perpetually worries has lost any chance for a real life in the luminous “Mockingbird.”

All Eminem records come in pairs, inharmonious and paradoxical in theme and content, yet each album following his rough early releases is blessed and cursed with it's own sibling. The Slim Shady LP/The Marshall Mathers LP is the halved story of cultural takeover by a split personality whose two sides are eerily alike, utilizing the marginalized, inherent Detroit grit-speak to simulate the deaths of previously obscure members of the lower class in order to catapult into the culture, only to murder and humiliate celebrities in the mainstream once that transition has been achieved. (Though Kim dies either way, as she was a celebrity in “Kim” because of Slim Shady LP’s “97 Bonnie And Clyde.”) The Eminem Show/Encore is a fanboy handjob that, with the latter, stops stroking the collective shaft moments from orgasm. Show is expansive, triumphant, thankful, slightly toned down, a little maudlin. It's finest track is “My Dad’s Gone Crazy,” where little Hailey joins her father in a smiley faced drama of personal fears colliding with the threats of fame and overexposure. Encore is both alienating and alien, where Em’s previously dexterous rapping is replaced by stoned speak and broken verses. A friend and I have a joke scenario wherein a pack of superfan white boyz purchase the CD, huddle around the car speakers, and become utterly perplexed by the opening song’s “Mama had a baby and it’s head popped off, head popped off, head popped off…” There’s a reason the final song ends with Eminem opening fire at his own audience.

RELAPSE WAS

Relapse was widely misread, underrated, panned by a music press that hasn’t taken Eminem seriously since 1999, and blindly tossed aside even by Em’s most astute admirers. Critic Robert Christgau, whose omnivorous listening habit can sometimes backfire to limit his understanding of and attention to individual CDs, branded Relapse a weak “horrorcore” album before moving on to the continuing avalanche of records that mark his reviewing life. Taking opening song “3.A.M.’s” line “you’re walking down the horror corridor” as definitive proof of Em’s genre slumming, Christgau concludes his Consumer Guide review with the summation: “Em, this is not a Slim Shady album. Slim Shady had a lightness about him.”

Relapse is not a Slim Shady album, nor is it Horrorcore. What it is is far more complicated and troubling. Horrorcore is defined in Alanzo Westbrook’s dict. of hiphop terminology as “Rap with themes of horror, dead bodies, funerals, tombs, etc.” Relapse has themes of horror, yes, and more dead bodies than a season of Dexter. But this is not Horrorcore. Relapse is a piece of horror: Eminem’s horror of himself, his addictions and demons, his place at the top of a culture that dehumanizes it’s royalty and takes secret pleasure in their downfalls and occasional demises.

THERE ARE SO

There are so many references to pharmaceutical drugs in almost every track.

EXTRACTS FROM

Extracts from selected songs give you more than enough evidence that Relapse is, above all, a concept album. Relapse is a memoir of unbearable pain hidden beneath the blood monsoon of a slasher film.

 Swallowing the Klonopin

while I’m nodding in and out on the ottoman-3 A.M.

 …This is just a story of when I was just a shorty

 And how I became hooked on Valium

Valium was in everythin’, food that I ate

The water that I drank, fuckin’ peas in my plate…-My Mom

 …He’s no longer getting’ them free, 100 bucks for these percodans

 Plus it’s getting’ to be where he lustfully searched the den

 Pain is hittin’ his knee and his muscles be hurtin’ him.

 Well, I don’t mean any harm, all I wanted to do is just say Hello

 Do ya happen to have anythin’ on you to make my mood mellow?

 Some are opal and some are pink

 Some are blue and some are just yellow

-Hello

 Climb the gate and ring the bell like, ‘Hello, my love

 I just picked your prescription for Seroquel up [a drug I was utterly dependent on for 3 years, btw]

Now would you like to share a pill or two with me?

I’ll share my Valium with you ‘cause I’m feelin’ you, Britney

I’ll trade you a blue one for a pink one

Ever since a schoolgirl juvenile delinquent

I’ve been feeling you, ohh, ohh girl, you sexy little gal

You hold that pill any longer it’ll get sentimental value

Come on, toots, give me the Valium alleyoop

I’ll slam dunk it in your mouth till you puke…-Same Song & Dance

 Back by popular demand

 Now pop a little Zantac or ant’-acid if you can

…Give me my ventolin inhaler and 2 Xenadrine

 And I’ll invite Sarah Palin out to dinner
 Nail her…-We Made You

Everything is a metaphor and fantasy except the ubiquitous presence of little white and green pills. The opening skit, “Dr. West,” has Em fooled back into substances and murder by his devilish doctor (played by Dominic West), leading into the bleak “3 A.M.,” which is packed with drug shout-outs weaved into the story of Em murdering people while trapped in a fugue state. The subtlety is hard to discern under the sensationalism of “3 A.M.,” but if you listen hard enough it is clear that the pills are more genuine than the crimes. “I guess I just blacked out again, not again…”

EMINEM AND OTHER CELEBRITIES

Eminem and other celebrities have a relationship as combative as the one between Em and his own mother. The A-list didn’t know what hit them when this scrawny, pale loudmouth began blasting the likes of Christina Aguilera and Fred Durst, Hilary Duff and Jessica Simpson in #1 music videos and singles. Soon enough, Em was tangling with Mariah Carey, Michael Jackson, Moby, all aghast at his revenge tactics, insouciant prankery and outspoken abrasiveness.

His relationship to fellow stars is markedly different in Relapse. Britney, Amy, Lindsay, Kim, Heath…they are just as important as the Valium, Seroquel and Percodan. First, though, Em goes back to the past. His fucked past.

THERE ARE TWO SONGS

There are two songs, “My Mom” and “Insane,” that begin this phantasmagoric mindscape in the half-imagined ghetto of pre-fame, pre-Hollywood, pre-Dre, pre-success hell. In “My Mom,” Em apologizes for another anti-Deborah screed, but he needs to divulge more incidents from his upbringing. In the world of “My Mom,” Deb spikes her son’s food with Valium, “Just enough of it to season my steak/so today I have at least three stomach aches.”

“Insane,” is a ghastly song where young Marshall is brutally molested by his (fictional) step-father. Leading with the amazing credo, “I was born with a dick in my brain/yea, fucked in the head/my step-father said that I sucked in the bed,” Em assaults us with details of his abuse and his own mother’s indifference, even encouragement (“Oh go fuck his brains out if any’s left in his head.”)

In a concept album exploring celebrity, pills, deathdreams, and the shadow of oblivion, Eminem uses “My Mom” and “Insane” to alternately convey the emotional essence if not the hard facts about his growing up (see Encore’s “Yellow Brick Road” for a realistic nostalgia trip) and a prelude of obscurity. Throughout the album, Em names, lusts for, and pretends to kill celebrities who, like him, have been stalked by the press for their self-destructive habits. With these early songs, he is beginning the conversation by saying we all came from somewhere. We carry secrets from our former shared obscurity. It was more than celebrity that made us this way. In an ominous hint of the album’s larger vision, Eminem tosses off a line about going to sleep with a “Heath Ledger bobble head.”

THE MURDERS IN RELAPSE

The murders in Relapse are a means of verbal release. The songs before “Same Song & Dance,” truly the album’s centerpiece and Eminem’s career tour de force, are sickening, and we feel the thrill in Em’s flow as the elements of his personal downfall become filtered through expertly modulated hatred and bloodletting. Yes, he calls himself “Shady” on “Hello,” the coolly procedural and strangely melancholic 6^th track, but that’s just a smokescreen. A majority of Relapse feels like doped-up mutterings from Eminem as his eyes flutter and palms keep sweating. Relapse is overwhelmed with slayings, home abortions, cannibalism, vaginal mutilation, lynchings, anal rape, yet the scariest moment comes near the end, when the layers of plastic horror veil off to expose real-life sketches of Eminem’s daughter terrified at her father’s unshaved beard and his recent habit of ignoring her when she tries to speak to him.

SAME SONG & DANCE IS

“Same Song & Dance” is the great cultural mutilation horror film. Over a dreamy, club-struck and harmony infused beat by Dr. Dre, Eminem projects himself as a fringe-dwelling serial killer at the forefront of the pop universe. The song is preceded by a skit called “Tonya,” where a working class woman (voiced by actress Tonya Banks) flags down a car in the middle of a rainstorm. She complains that her OnStar isn’t working and she left her phone at home, realizing only too late that her knight in shining armor, who has been suspiciously quiet this whole time, is ripping off a sheaf of duct tape intended for her.

The song begins, bumping, seductive. It is a microcosm of the entire album, starting with a verse about Tonya’s murder. From the chick-on-the-block spelling of her name to her desperate means, Tonya is a Detroit girl, a one-night-stand, wearing a cheap fur coat, possibly a trashy old friend of Kim’s that Em forgot about years ago. But she’s back, a reminder of his roots, the roots he has to nullify through exploitation and betrayal. “I walk up on ya, well Hello Tonya, I think you got your OnStar button inside your car stuck,” Em says to her on the road to Los Angeles. But soon enough, Tonya, by extension his humble beginnings and forgotten mall girls, is “jacked and body snatched and it’s a wrap,” and since he heard that “opposites attract”-because they are opposites now, the solidarity of class having long been erased-it will take a “task force to get you back.” When Jennifer Lopez continues playing lip service to her “block” while shooting “going back” advertisements on LA greenscreens, it takes a real artist like Eminem to approach the complexity of the pop star’s relationship to their own yellow brick road, which is always there, staring after them and mailing unopened invitations.

Now that Tonya has been slain, Eminem moves to bigger names, like Lindsay Lohan, “Big movie star, a party girl, big fun.” Because he’s reached the higher echelons, Em can sit in the front row of Nickelodeon shows, oogling her buns and planning his attack.

Remember Lindsay Lohan? Before she knew it, Lindsay was ground up. She was burnt out, a party slut, a confused bisexual, a tasteless bitch, a waste of time. There’s a reason Eminem chose her for the slaughter. Like Frank Booth looking into the eyes of the seemingly innocent Jeffrey Beaumont, Marshall can push Lindsay against a wall, stare her down, and tell her, “You’re like me.” Lindsay was also a once-invincible talent considered a human being by vulture tabloids and People Magazine (the biggest vulture of all, because it thinks it isn’t) until she proved that she actually was a human being, warts and all, addictions and all, same-sex attractions and all, and lost the honor of being considered a human being by the “Entertainment Journalism” that never analyzes the work of the people it’s so brainlessly obsessed with, and views individuals as stock market figures. In “Same Song & Dance,” the industry becomes the hospital ward of “3 A.M.,” where the “Coroner is waiting to corner you…All he wants is to kill you in front of an audience/While everybody is watching in the party, applauding it.”

Eminem’s murder of Lindsay Lohan is a mercy killing, a delivery of the death already predicted and expected of her on millions of lurid tabloid covers and all the criticisms of every flabby bare curve in her embarrassing attempts to replicate Marilyn Monroe’s nude allure. The tragedy of the cut is that Eminem cannot bring himself to offer Lindsay a hand of commiseration. The Lindsay here is “lookin’ a little thin,’ hon.” He offers her a ride to rehab in Brighton. Where before, Em would dress up like Michael Jackson to bait shock and litigation, he’s specifically aligning himself with another fallen star, standing with her in a Hollywood cemetery, above graves already dug and waiting for their lifeless OD’d husks. “Slowly she gets in and I begin to lynch her/with sixty six inches of extension cord.”

Em’s delivery is calm, with occasional lapses into a Jamaican accent. The chorus harkens to a scene in Nicholas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive, where the beleaguered, exhausted gangster Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) is forced to off an old friend who won’t give him essential information. He gracefully slices the man’s entire wrist open, pulling their bodies together, gently reassuring his friend that “It’s over, it’s over.”

Eminem, like Rose, is a villain whose former compassion has been reduced to the smallest ember. He has just enough respect for human life to calmly guide his targets toward their final passage. This hallucinating pied piper, beckoning untold women into the darkest of caves, sings to them,

 Yea baby, do that dance

 It’s the last dance you’ll ever get the chance to do

 Girl, shake that ass, you ain’t ever gonna break that glass

 The windshield’s too strong for you

The soothing evil spreads like tar across the vitality of women, their dancing, their liveliness, specifically celebrity women, who can become, in the lens of America’s hard eye, nothing resembling a woman at all. He continues,

 I said, yeah baby, sing that song

 It’s the last song you’ll ever get the chance to sing

 You sexy little thing, show me what you got, give it your all
 Look at you bawl, why you cryin’ to me? Same song and dance

It’s the most elegiac moment of Eminem’s output, that poem of the last song she’ll ever get the chance to sing. It applies to his second target, a woman whose ascendance occurred at almost the exact same time as his. Like Eminem, she’s been laid on a slab, gutted by snapshots, forced into witch trials concerning her mothering skills, weight fluctuations, “Crazy” incidents and, underneath it all, the accusation of why she hasn’t died yet. (Remember the South Park episode when she was sacrificed by the paparazzi “for Harvest?”) Britney answered her critics in the scathing, awesome “Piece Of Me,” but here Eminem becomes the full-measure, Aton Chigurgh Death Angel of the rancorous press. The remnants of flashbulbs still light up his back as he stalks after her, ready for what has to be done.

Em’s account of his voyeuristic attachment to her is universal. He’s giving voice to millions of fawning young girls and their leering fathers in the sweep of this verse,

 She played a little schoolgirl when she first burst upon the scene

 And seen that the world was hers

 She twirls and turns and flirts in skirts so bad, it hurts

 It irked me and made me mad at first

Em tried lashing out in his songs, but he realizes he’s nursing a crush. The Britney he approaches here is no longer the “little schoolgirl” who had seen that the world was hers. She is the overphotographed, overcriticized amateur barber. She has too many bruises from being pinched, tugged, touched, rubbed and slapped by too many unfamiliar fingers.

He creeps up to her mansion in stilettos, jumps the gate and rings the bell. He entices Britney with Seroquel, a tiny pink pill that serves as an excellent sleep aide, a drug I had to have in my possession at all times for years, swallowing two or three a night and entering a completely dead sleep. I know what Britney needs those for is what I’m saying. He’s already lynched Lindsay. For Britney, he threatens to make a “new outfit” out of her. “New outfit? Shit, I’ll make a suit out of you, Shoot.”

These two, alone in a mansion sprawl, playing out one final secret confrontation. They each have more money than they’ll ever know. They will each be remembered forever. Their songs helped define our national story in the new millennium. They are more than themselves. But it couldn’t have ended anywhere but here. She puts up a weak, limp fight. He dominates her in music and motion. He kills her!

Eminem carves into Britney Spears, subtracting the skin from the icon, until it is not Britney’s golden wrist but a bloody heap of severed flesh. He disembowels her, skins her, removes her famous face. Eminem slides his hand into the Britney gloves. He pulls up the curvy legs like snow pants. He wears her ass. Finally, Em  slips on her face and hair like a permanent Halloween mask. He dances in front of a mirror, his movements stilted, the doubled frame adjusting to itself. He tries the Moonwalk and falls down. Standing on the balcony, Em/Britney screams into the night. Amy Winehouse is awake. So is Brittany Murphy, his former co-star and paramour. They hear it. They understand, but they’re far too gone to heed the warning.

A year later, at the close of my favorite album, Kanye West wrote, “Run from the lights/Run from the night/Run for your life.” That bold advice was intended for the entire human race. “Same Song & Dance” is the final movement in a community of sufferers. Eminem is telling Lindsay and Britney to run from the lights, the night, run for their lives, not only from him, who couldn’t run from himself, but them, who represent a far more potent threat than the rapper.

THE ALBUM BREAKS

The album breaks down and reconstitutes itself shortly thereafter. With cheesy Radio Play theatrics, Em, in critical condition, is placed on a stretcher and taken to the hospital. The tracks “DéjàVu” and “Beautiful” are tear-stained letters from a spent heart, dispelling all Serial Killer poses and directly massaging the locus. It’s here that he allows us inside, sharing Hailey's fears (“I think my dad’s gone crazy”) and the same song and dance of his daily pill regime:

Start off with the NyQuill like, ‘I think I’ll just have a taste.’

Couple of sips of that then I gradually graduate

To a harder prescription drug called Valium like yeah that’s great.

I go to take just one and I end up like having eight.

Relapse is burdened by the same elements that flew on past Eminem records, the angry Paul Rosenberg phone call and various cinematic flourishes, the guest appearances in a work that is so singularly one voice. The only skit the album really needs is “Tonya.” The rest seem like filler, afterthoughts. Relapse has a focused, Bressonian momentum from “3 A.M.” to “Same Song & Dance,” and by the time we reach “Beautiful,” Eminem can barely speak. He raps with bloodshot eyes and a parched throat. He will collapse once the song is over. The Queen sample might have to go on looping without him.

DON’T LET THEM SAY

 Don’t let them say you ain’t beautiful

 They can all get fucked just stay true to you.

He isn’t speaking to anyone really, not his daughter, not the hypothetical listener asked to walk a mile in his shoes. Eminem is returning from his journeys into no-limit language catharsis. He shares the sentiment of Matt Damon’s LeBouf in the Coen Brothers’ True Grit, who tells Mattie Ross, “I am considerably diminished.” He doesn’t expect or desire sympathy. Eminem just needs to keep going.

There is a shamefulness to “Beautiful.” We’re embarrassed for him, the ex-husband who shows up on his estranged family’s front porch in the morning to share his most recent epiphany, or the friend who was before the group wit but is now washed with humane euphoria since being humbled by some such turn of the screw. Eminem is hanging on to our shoulders. He knows he’s gone to far, and it’s time to attack the only point that was previously obscured. He is just as sickened as we are at what he pulled out himself to be able to rap again; he's numbed by his darkness.

  But I just can’t admit

  Or come to grips with the fact I may be done with rap

  I need a new outlet

  And I know some shit’s so hard to swallow

  But I can’t just sit back and wallow

  In my own sorrow but I know one fact

  I’ll be one tough act to follow

 One tough act to follow

 I’ll be one tough act to follow

 Here today, gone tomorrow

The repetition of “one tough act to follow” is similar to Van Morrison’s fetishisation of the sentence “you breath in you breath out” in Astral Weeks’ “Beside You.” He almost can’t believe he’s saying these words, and they get stuck in this throat. He has to repeat it three times. If Relapse was Horrorcore a song like “Beautiful” wouldn't have been included. This pie-eyed, in-scene gushing works despite itself, outside of itself. There is no inspiration to be gleaned. His banging against the windshield has softened to dry thumps. Eminem doesn’t really want us to walk a mile in his shoes. He only wants to run. Run from the lights. Run from the night. Run for his life.

 

THERE’S A MOMENT

There’s a moment during “Insane,” when a countervoice enters the song and asks Em “What the fuck you sayin’?”

“I don’t know, help me!”

“What the fuck’s happening?”

“I think I’m fucking melting.” Eminem’s voice liquefies, splashing like nuclear waste against your ears. “I think I’m fUCKiNG MeLLLLTInGG.” Those few seconds of studio sonic FX capture, to my ears, the entire story of Eminem’s plummet. You don’t need “We Made You,” a boppable song that feels like warmed over “Same Song & Dance” leftovers. You don’t need “Crack A Bottle,” “Old Time’s Sake” with the roster of guests including 50 and Dre, or the final track, “Underground,” where Em goes killer again. These are all OK songs, and I understand that after 4 years Marshall felt he needed to give his fans a few extra bouquets. (Though, when you think about it, no Eminem album really sticks the landing, except, ironically, Recovery, with the moving Proof tribute “You’re Never Over.”) Yet the finest moments on Relapse, indeed the songs that combine to make a great album, all revolve like tumor planets around the axis where Eminem is fucking melting.

I THINK RECOVERY

I think Recovery is awkward, propulsive, often terrific, frequently dumb. It's the album of an artist in transition, copping a ‘tude and flow that makes Em sound like a too-ebullient, cocksure jock. On the plus of this new coat of paint, we get two-fisted Spillaneish gems like “Not Afraid,” “WTP” (AKA White Trash Party, an attempt to reconcile with all the Tonyas by letting them grind against him), “Spacebound” “Love The Way You Lie,” “No Love,“ “You’re Never Over.” The downside is Eminem’s embrace of Arena Rock and P!NK, and an abandonment of the old sensibility and vision made roving by the demons he since flushed out.

Relapse is the darkest work to have ever triumphed in the mass-market, the highest mainstream, Best-Buy and Target, opened windows blasting. It’s linked with Recovery, as all major Eminem albums exist in pairs. Both offer a rare chance to view an artist denouncing past art because it scares him. Yet if you were Eminem, and you found out what you found out on Relapse, after years of misery, what would you do? Some of us are able to embrace objects from a bad time. To others though, like Eminem, they simply don’t count. They can't.

Special thanks to Galen Carlson and Metrolyrics.com